New Year: A perfect man for the New Year

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NEW YEAR brings the promise of a change for most of us, with resolutions to change our lifestyle, eat better, exercise more and be better people.

In fact, it’s mainly pretty well the same as happens every year – moaning about the weather, planning a holiday to cheer oneself up, scrambling to find a bargain in the sales, scrutinising the New Year honours list, checking out the New Year babies and generally wishing we lived where the sun shines all year round.

Looking back over three decades of the Derby Evening Telegraph archives, little seems that has changed.

In 1976, for instance, there was a bumper crop of babies in the Derby area, including twin girls born at Wirksworth Maternity Home to a Draycott mum, and a son, born early to a Mickleover mother, who arrived on his father’s 29th birthday.

The New Year was heralded by wintry weather with a touch of sleet and rain; the sales got off to a bumper start with ladies coats selling for £4.99, three piece suites for £249 and double beds for as little as £39.95; and there were OBEs for Derby magistrate Colonel Geoffrey Aspdin and Mr Kenneth Gill, principal of Portland Training College for the Disabled, at Mansfield.

Ten years earlier, on January 1, 1966, it was leaders of local industry who were among the award winners, including an OBE for services to export for Mr Thomas Cooper, managing director of the mower company, Qualcast Ltd, and a similar honour for Cyril Bradley, branch secretary and organiser of Derby Transport and General Workers’ Union.

Barlow Taylor’s store had a clearance sale in all departments which produced lengthy queues in the Market Place.

The New Year was seen in by many people at numerous church services around Derby, including the cathedral.

By 1986, the New Year news stories were about how much people earned and the way that they spent it.

Households in the East Midlands were said, in a new government survey, to have one of the highest average weekly incomes in the country; while Chatsworth aristocrat, the Duke of Devonshire, was voted one of Britain’s best dressed men.

That was the year that Evening Telegraph columnist Lucy Orgill told her readers, presumably after lengthy research, that the perfect man should have Daley Thompson’s body, Tom Selleck’s legs and face, Terry Wogan’s smile, George Michael’s looks and Bruce Springsteen’s bottom.

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This article is from the Derby Evening Telegraph and is reproduced online here.